I love pandan. There, I said it! I’ve loved it since I was a tiny little girl. It was one of those things that would appear into my life as some delicious jelly or steamed cake and I’d be reminded of how much I liked this mysterious green thing. Then, just as quickly as it appeared, it would disappear into the depths of my digestive system… Anyway, it was the Mid-Autumn Festival of 2010, and I was eating a mooncake with an unknown flavor. I bite into it — it’s pandan in a glorious mooncake filling version! And determined to never let it get away from me again, I finally looked up what it was called. Pandan, apparently.

Fast forward 1.5 years. By now, I even know what it’s called in Chinese — 香兰叶 (xiang lan ye, which translates to fragrant orchid leaf, which is not what pandan is). The pandan offerings of Beijing are minimal, though probably not any less so than most cities in the U.S. And, my mommy has given me a cupcake maker. What is there to stop me? Naturally I’d see what I could do with what is apparently giant blades of grass. I got myself a kilo of the stuff from (where else?) Taobao, China’s version of eBay.

I think that’s about 50 or so leaves, and it only cost me 66 kuai ($10.44) total to have it overnighted from somewhere down south.

Naturally, I got to work right away. I read up on how to get the pandan extract from the leaves, and I even saw one recipe that called for pandan syrup. This is how:

And then this is how you extract pandan’s essence:

It should look something like this:

And when you squeeze all the water out of that, you get:

And then that gives cupcakes a greenish tint and pandan-y flavor! While I consider these cupcakes a failure, they definitely got the flavor. Unfortunately, the cake was a bit dry and not as fluffy as I’d like, and I screwed up on the coconut buttercream by adding too much coconut milk. But this is exactly why I bought a kilo of pandan leaves! More pandan fun!